French In Action

French in Action is a DistanceLearning course funded by the Annenberg/CPB project (www.learner.org).

http://www.learner.org/resources/series83.html

Lessons air on the Annenberg/CPB channel, various public television stations, and as live streaming video from the learner.org site. (Lesson 1 is actually an introduction to how the course works.)

The course uses ImmersiveLearning to teach FrenchLanguage in a rapid, intuitive way, from the ground up. This has many advantages over traditional non-immersive techniques used in most classrooms.

-- (copied from LearningForeignLanguages:)

My best experience in learning a foreign language is French in Action. [...] It uses the approach of total immersion, there being no English instruction or translation in the entire course. Instead, we observe the language as it is used in a story which plays out over 52 episodes, and in additional examples, instructions, demonstrations, skits, film clips, television clips, and exercises. In the first lesson, one learns the usual greetings and farewells, the pronouns, the verbs aller (to go) and apprendre (to learn), a few additional nouns and adjectives, and a few other expressions. They even use aller as an auxiliary verb a couple of times, as in "Nous allons apprendre le français.", and in the second lesson, they explore that aspect fully. Like in Mr Kiser's example [in LearningForeignLanguages], they start with a useful subset of the language, with complete sentences of course, and slowly expand.

Since I was working with my own taped copies, I could watch a lesson as often as I wanted, and talk back to the television. I eventually ordered the textbook, which provided transcripts to follow and additional documents. By then, I had mastered through lesson 13 or so, and found that I could already read French better than I could read Spanish. And I had already taken four years of Spanish in high school.

In contrast, I learned Spanish in high school without the benefits of immersion, to any extent. When I got out of there, I could conjugate the heck out of a verb, but I couldn't express myself very well. The third year in, our teacher tried to get us to read a short novel in Spanish. Nobody could do it, and later I would realize it was because we hadn't learned how to ignore words we didn't know, so that we could eventually pick them up in context. Nor had we learned how to spot familiar verbs in unfamiliar conjugations, so that we could eventually pick those up in context as well. These are skills that immersion covertly teaches you, and these are skills that you probably use in your native language on a daily basis.

-- NickBensema

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